


If I was born as a blackthorn tree

by OccasionallyCreative



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Bond Shenanigans, Implied Sexual Content, Kissing, Making Out, Mutual Pining, Reylo Fanfiction Anthology, Tumblr: reylofanfictionanthology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-16 14:25:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16087949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OccasionallyCreative/pseuds/OccasionallyCreative
Summary: “You know the crystal stopped working? The Force has been calling out to me. I think I need to go and find my own.”“To get the saber working again?”“The saber’s not the issue. It’s the crystal.” Rey flicks switches, preparing for take-off. “I need to find my own. A new one.”“Oh. The way General Organa was speaking, it felt like a matter of life and death.”“To a Jedi, I guess it is.”





	If I was born as a blackthorn tree

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [diasterisms](http://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms/works) for brainstorming this fic with me, to the mods for their patience and kindness while organising this anthology, and to you for reading this! The main thing you need to know about this fic is that I'm too weak for Reylo being forced to face their feelings in enclosed spaces.
> 
> Find me on [Tumblr](http://mollymatterrs.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ehucklesby)!

The planet is green and grey. Tattered red and black flags hang in the air.

It feels wrong to call it a dream. It feels more like a remnant and a memory, both at once. This planet of green and grey, of raindrops on grass blades.

When she sees the mark of the Empire in her dreams, she goes to General Organa. Leia smiles, lines at the edges of her eyes and her wrinkled hands curving over the top of her cane.

“That’s Dantooine. A place of the Jedi, once upon a time. It was swallowed up by Palpatine’s shadow when the Empire came to power.”

Rey returns the smile with one of her own. “If I know anything from the texts,” (it’s an open secret on base, the fact that the last Jedi retained her scavenger ways) “it’s that the Force is resilient.”

Leia laughs from her belly then, giving one rip-roaring laugh.

“That’s an understatement.”

Later, Rey looks up the planet’s history. It’s the middle of the night, and though she feels inclined to think she’s the only one awake on base, she knows that being alone is a luxury that only people like the people of Canto Bight can have—to wander corridors alone, and look at the stars alone and feel the sheer size of the galaxy. The Resistance base is full to the brim, and pilots like Poe, soldiers like Finn, even the supposedly quiet and unimportant like Rose, feel the size of the galaxy by the battle and who they fight alongside. Not by how many stars they can count in the sky.

Agents, soldiers, and pilots brush shoulders all the time. Downtime only comes after a successful mission, and even that doesn’t last long. It’s a part of the routine now to find Resistance members napping at their stations or in corners of the base.

Rubbing her eyes, Rey continues reading. It was easy enough to find Dantooine’s entry on the database. There’s details about its history. Conflicts, wildlife, flora, vegetation, temperate, climate. All paragraphs of words strung together and numbers collated into a list.

It doesn’t soothe the itch deep within. It’s not an itch to be scratched, like an irritation on the skin after she’s brushed past some vegetation on a foreign planet, or a minor pulse at her neck that keeps her from focusing on a conversation.

In fact, to call it an itch isn’t right. As wrong as calling what comes to her when sleep takes, a dream.

Her fingers slide underneath her shirt, where the crystal of Master Skywalker sits on a long leather rope around her neck. The crystal of Master Skywalker’s saber faded soon after Crait. Soon after she slammed the door on—

Rey doesn’t quite know what name to give the face that comes into her mind, kneeling before her in Crait’s salt at the base of the Falcon’s ramp. He’d had such wide, apologetic eyes.

For a moment, she had thought he’d come to her. She’d thought she might let him. (Which part of that scares her most now, when she thinks back on that moment? She likes to think she doesn’t know.)

She had cut off the idle dangerous idea by cutting him off.

Rey brushes the name aside, a decision to be made when they meet again.

“Focus,” she whispers. She draws the Force in towards her, and breathes out. Repeat. In, out, repeat. That is her routine now, with the faded crystal between finger and thumb. When the responsibility is too realistic, the reality before her too detailed, and she needs things to blur out for a while.

When she comes to, she opens her eyes and knows immediately what she needs. It’s a pull in her heart, the thing that’s not quite an itch, and she needs to follow it.

She is exposed here, even surrounded by skilled pilots and soldiers willing to die for their cause.

A Jedi without a blade is like a soldier without a blaster.

She returns to Leia, who stands within the circle of commanders, admirals and generals. The crowd parts for the last Jedi.

“I need clearance to take leave,” she says clearly, confidently, to the general. She makes it sound urgent, like it’s a mission.

“This related to our conversation yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Clearance granted.”

 

* * *

 

The trip will take about two to three days through the hyperspace lanes, so she stops off at a spaceport for supplies. Slinging a satchel over her shoulder, she heads down the ramp.

The port teems with life. Alien lifeforms chatter in their languages, and there are smells in the air that make her stomach rumble.

Swiping a card into the docking bay terminal, she slides it into her pocket. It contains a fake ID, standard Resistance equipment; especially when one of their number is on a not-quite mission. She winds a scarf around her head and neck, covering her mouth and jawline with it in an attempt at disguise. She lowers her eyes and doesn’t thank vendors as she buys food to fill her stomach.

Tourists thank, and they barter. Pirates, smugglers, travellers, the ones who use spaceports regularly, do nothing of the sort. They fix it so they always have the exact amount of credits for each transaction. Fewer questions that way.

(The fact Rey merely has credits to buy food and doesn’t have to barter ever, anymore, still makes her giddy sometimes.)

Tucked in an alleyway, with her brown eyes made black, blue and pink by the reflections of flickering neon above, is a public refresher. Twenty-five credits for half an hour. There are three other public refreshers crowded in this tiny alleyway, with alien vendors calling out prices, offers. Some offer massages to those who pay the right price. One seedy bar is more obvious and has a holo of a Twi’lek dancing, beckoning to customers with a kiss blown into the ether.

Rey turns away, paying the credits to the vendor without complaint and slips inside. There’s the showers to her left and a locker room to her right, with the cost of an extra credit to store her clothes. In the showers, eight cubicles line the left and right walls. Thin, ragged curtains give some semblance of privacy.

Rey keeps her provided robe on as long as she can, until the last moment, her head down as she ducks, naked, into the cubicle, pulling the thin curtain shut. She shudders at the cold air.

This doesn’t have the sonic showers like the base. She’s glad for that. She hates sonic showers. They are too busy for her, too intrusive, blasting water then cold and hot air at once. At least with an ancient, rusted shower like this, she can get lost in her thoughts for half an hour.

Twenty-five credits isn’t a bad exchange for the gift of being alone for a while.

After fiddling with the controls, cold water spits out at her from the head, rapidly turning warm. She shivers underneath the growing temperature, ripping open the sachet of soap the bored attendant slid over the counter at her. They were too high on spice to care about who she was and went back to lighting a joint when their brief interaction was done.

As she washes, eking out the meagre amount of soap in the packet, she feels out with the Force and looks through the thin plastic curtains. The only presence is another human, their thoughts entrenched in the mundane. They wonder if they’ve enough time to grab food before they head back to work. When Rey looks in the direction of the thought, the human is to her right, rubbing water into their face. Their thoughts then wander towards the bars of the Cantina Band song, so Rey draws the Force back in, turning away.

She doesn’t use all the time allocated to her. Poe warned her as to how these things work, the first time she came across one. She wanted to go inside, feeling grimy from sweat, running all day from troopers, but Poe shook his head.

“They’re complete rip-off merchants. Any way they can squeeze extra credits out of you, they do,” he said, like she was meant to be surprised.

Ten minutes before the automated switch-off, she gets out, wrapping and tying the robe around her waist. Her footsteps leave water spatters on the chipped tiles. She takes a towel from the attendant for an extra two credits to be added to her final bill, and it reeks of spice smoke.

Sitting on a bench, she dries her hair quickly and methodically. The days she washed on Jakku, she never wasted the time she could spend scavenging with time making herself look nice. It was just a way of scraping off a layer of sand, and making sure whoever came back for her knew she could look after herself.

She was proud (is proud) of the fact she can look after herself. _I don’t need you to look after me_ , she could say to the family looking for her, and they’d be so proud of her, knowing their little girl could survive.

Rey feels a twinge in her heart and cuts the memory off. Not for now.

When her hair’s half dry, she opens her locker, taking out her clothes and what little possessions she has. She travels light usually, and today, she travels lighter. Hooking the pendant around her neck, she pulls on her trousers, her shirt. The layers feel stiff on her newly clean skin. Her boots feel like hard leather. Her arm bands in place, she pulls her hair back clean from her face.

It comes then.

Rey stills. She eyes the attendant. Their eyes are bloodshot and half-closed, mind someplace other than the here and now.

The buzz at the back of her skull deepens as the connection fizzles back into life. She wonders what did it, while her head turns just a little to her left, where she knows somehow he will be.

She expects an intense stare, sorrow and hatred mixed into one. She expects what she last saw on Crait, but instead, she sees a man asleep with his mouth half-open and his arm thrown over his torso. His thumb gently twitches against his belly, and his toes twitch too. He’s dreaming, too deeply asleep to realise this is happening.

Once, she had a theory that the connection came to life when one of them needed the other. She flushes slightly, thinking that, if that’s true, he’s dreaming of her.

He doesn’t really look like an evil wizard. His black hair is mussed from sleep, and there’s a slight shadow of facial hair on his upper lip and chin.

“Ben,” she whispers. His eyes snap open, bleary at first, but they find hers. In a breath, the connection is gone.

 

* * *

 

Hours later, with fresh supplies on board, she climbs into the Falcon’s pilot seat to find a holo recording, sent by Finn. He wants to know if she’s safe.

She rings him immediately. His holo flickers on, and he’s bleary-eyed, with oil marks on his shirt. Rey dimly remembers Rose volunteering to give Finn lessons on proper ship maintenance when he almost electrocuted himself trying to repair an old X-wing.

“General Organa said you were going on a mission,” Finn says halfway into their friendly small talk, unable to keep from the subject for a moment longer. “Off the books?”

“I’m safe. It’s Jedi stuff,” she tells him, with a smile. Isolation was what kept her trapped on Jakku. She has to keep truths from Finn, but she won’t keep everything from him. He’s her first friend. Her best friend. “You know the crystal stopped working? The Force has been calling out to me. I think I need to go and find my own.”

“To get the saber working again?”

“The saber’s not the issue. It’s the crystal.” Rey flicks switches, preparing for take-off. “I need to find my own. A new one.”

“Oh. The way General Organa was speaking, it felt like a matter of life and death.”

“To a Jedi, I guess it is.”

Finn grins at her reply.

“I’ll leave you to it.”

“See you later.”

They sign off simultaneously then, and she lifts the Falcon into the air. Setting the coordinates, she jumps the ship into hyperspace and settles it into autopilot.

She lasts five seconds before she’s up, out of the seat and the cockpit. Where’s she going, she doesn’t quite know. She lets her feet take the lead, heading towards the maintenance hatch and jumping inside. Without tools, she sets about tinkering. Fiddling, as Rose calls it. Rose has done a good job on the Falcon since Leia assigned it to her.

Leia could see how much Rose itched to get her hands on the ship from the moment Rose clapped eyes on the old girl.

After her first day with the Falcon, the hyperdrive was fixed, permanently, and the engine ran smoothly, rumbling instead of whining.

“She’s temperamental,” Rose said with a grin, wiping oil from the back of her hand onto her forehead, “but I like that.”

A hiss of steam from one of the Falcon’s landing jets indicated a kind of agreement from the ship.

“There’s something in that thing,” Leia said wryly. “Han never told me what it was, but I don’t think it was the sort of thing easily explained.”

Rey could spend hours in the Falcon’s inner workings. She’d spent so much time in the belly of hollowed-out Star Destroyers, which were horrific remnants of old worlds, cold and grey. The Falcon is alive, speaking a strange language she’s just about half-deciphered. Sometimes, on days where she misses the connection most and dreams of a boy reaching across the stars to find her, it feels like the Falcon doesn’t want to speak to her. It shuts down. Sparks spit at her, and mechanisms develop odd faults.

Today, a jet of steam blows directly in her face, not harmful, but almost like a snarl of ' _go away_ '.

Rey climbs out of the hatch, fetching tools. She works with that fault first.

“I’m not thinking about him,” she promises to no-one but the ship she’s looking after. The back of her hand connects with a pipe, suddenly too hot and she winces, snatching it away. She rubs the burn with her fingers. “I can’t control it. Just as much as I can’t control you.”

There’s a rumble from the engine, and a flicker of the lights overhead as if the Falcon is laughing at her. It doesn’t frighten her, the idea of this ship teeming with life. It’s just another explanation.

One day, she’ll make a journey back to Jakku, and ask Unkar for an explanation. Why he lied and drip-fed her tidbits about her parents, every so often. “Smugglers,” he told her, when she was 8 and asked what they did. “Pirates, it’s all semantics. I don’t know, girl.”

He did that to crush her hopes that they were heroes. But instead, she decided to make her own hero, out of scraps of orange cotton and straw that she bartered all by herself. It didn’t matter that her parents weren’t heroes. Smugglers always came back, eventually.

Sitting cross-legged in the small space of the hatch, Rey digs further into the wires. One stray wire falls over her head, brushing through her hair. She continues working until she no longer sees Ben Solo’s face.

 

* * *

 

Rey's back is sore and there’s a pain in her neck when she extracts herself from the wires. Stumbling, walking awkwardly after so many hours of sitting cross-legged, cramped, she gently sits at the dejarik table. The well-worn, lived-in cushions ease her back and neck for a little while, as she softly massages the sore spots.

When she’s able to move, with a groan she stands. She wanders over towards the kitchenette area, heating some food out of a packet. It’s hot when it comes out and she cradles it in her hands, taking it into the main quarters. She sits with her legs stretched out, using her hands as a knife and fork, tearing the food into bite-sized portions.

She smiles when she remembers Finn’s first reaction to her eating a meal. He’d been taught to eat like it was another part of the military machine. She ate like a survivor. When she’s alone, like now, she still eats like that. She’s too aware of people now to eat like that around them. In the mess hall, she uses a knife and fork, as Finn taught her, and wipes her fingers on a napkin.

She still wolfs it down, though.

That’s a habit she can’t quite break.

Finished, she throws the packet away and washes her hands. She has an idle thought to return to the cockpit and watch the stream of stars.

“Rey.”

She stops short, tap water running over her hands. The cold trickles through her body, quickly followed by a rushing warmth, something a little too like relief.

“How long have you been there?” she asks, clearing her throat.

“A while.”

“I would’ve noticed you,” she says.

A smirk touches his lips. “True.” Then his face softens into curiosity, his brow knitted into a frown. “What are you doing?”

Her world slides to the left, the ship jerking to a stop, out of hyperspace. Rey stumbles back from the impact. Another landing blow tilts the ship forwards slightly. Rey stumbles and Ben hurries forward to catch her before she can fall.

Her hand flies to his bicep, holding onto him tight. His arms cling to her waist.

“What’s happening?”

“I think—I don’t know—”

Rey scrambles, trying to maintain a grip on the rocking ship, as rocks pummel the sides and underbelly. She feels Ben following her, running after her. Wherever he is, he must look ridiculous, running after a girl only he can see.

There’s a minor triumph there, but there are bigger things to worry about.

Stumbling into the cockpit, Rey manages to gain her composure clinging onto the high of the pilot’s seat.

“Oh, Maker,” she breathes. It’s an uncharted asteroid field. Clusters of rocks drift by. She jumps into the pilot seat, grabbing the controls.

Ben stands there, uselessly clenching and unclenching his fists.

“What’s. Happening.”

“I can’t—”

“ _Rey._ ”

She sighs. Relenting, she opens her mind to him, sending a vision across the connection. It’s something they discovered, by accident. She found herself connected and staring at Ben’s toes, wet from a shower, when Ben had let his thoughts wander.

They can’t control one another to gain a tactical advantage, but they can call out to each other and show one another visions. Some days, it feels like the Force is playing a cruel trick on them both.

“Keep that open,” he says, like an order. She blinks as he clambers into the co-pilot’s seat.

“Sorry?”

“I’m helping you.”

“You’re not—”

“You can’t command me.”

“You can’t command me either,” she snaps, just as another asteroid collides with their left flank. That makes her decision for her. “Fine. Keep the ship straight.”

“What? No. We perform evasive manoeuvres.”

“What does it matter to you?” Rey snarls, rising up from her chair and delving into a section of wires overhead. She swears in Huttese, beads of sweat popping on her forehead. “Just keep it straight. One of the asteroids knocked out the—no, no, we’re okay for hyperspace, thank the Force.”

“Hyperspace? Out of an asteroid field? The odds of that succeeding are—I don’t know, a billion to one? Perform evasive manoeuvres and get this piece of junk out of here before you make any grand plans, Rey.”

A set of sparks scatter over Ben’s head, another malfunction springing up.

“Not now,” Rey sighs, swearing she hears Ben mutter ‘I didn’t mean it’ under his breath. “Okay, that’s a minor fix. Can you keep it _straight_ —”

The Falcon sweeps left, up and then immediately down. Ben’s grip on the controls tightens as he prepares to face down another asteroid, twice the size of the one he’s just evaded.

Rey glares at him.

“What are you doing?”

“Saving your life.”

“No!”

“Stop being so reckless, Rey, for once!”

“Don’t tell me what to do!”

“I’m not, that—that’s Skywalker’s.” His eyes are firmly on the thin rope around her neck. His eyes drop lower, where the crystal lies tucked underneath her shirt. He lifts his eyes back towards hers. “You’re wearing his crystal.”

“What?”

“You’re wearing his crystal.”

Rey wrinkles her nose. “That’s ridiculous—wait—are you _jealous_?”

He shifts in his seat. “No.”

“Ben! It’s a kyber crystal, even if it is unused and, and old and—hell, it’s valuable. I can’t just keep it among my things. I have to protect it.”

His fingers curl around the controls, and his jaw grows tight.

“Protect.”

“I’m a Jedi! I protect the past, I don’t run from it!” It’s a low blow, and she winces as it comes out of her mouth. Ben’s eyes darken. Hurriedly, she continues. “I would do the same for you, in a heartbeat because what I feel for you I’ve never felt for anyone else! The fact that you would accuse me, so quickly, of betraying you, when you were the one who—who—”

His eyes soften, but the challenge is in there. It hangs between them, whispered almost by the Force itself.

_Say it._

With an exerted effort, a screech that digs low from her lungs and shatters them, she steers the Falcon. The entire ship tilts left, and swerves, the back end curving around. Rey feels hot tears prick at her eyes as she looks past the cockpit viewport.

They’re caught in the orbit of a scarlet red planet. It burns bright, but not so brightly as the man sitting next to her, the unspoken words still in the air between them. Adrenaline quickly leaving her, Rey sits back, slumping into the chair.

“Where are we?” she asks, one hand still on the controls. Like a captain talking to their first mate. Their right hand.

For a long moment, Ben doesn’t speak.

“It’s the Red…” He swallows. “The Red Nebula.”

She pulls it up from the Falcon’s database.

“G-21… Comet field… Cosmic cataclysm… separated from the rest of the universe.” She glances over the planet a second time. Beyond the scarlet hue, she sees a pockmarked wasteland. If she felt out with the Force, she knows what she’d find. A planet barren of life, of adventure. “Drifting.”

“That entry leaves a lot out.” Ben’s tone is thoughtful. Her gaze drops from the planet, to the golden dice that hang above. She hears Ben give a soft chuckle. “That’s where they went. I thought those things were left on Crait.”

“You thought Luke had them.”

“I did. You know, Han… Han Solo… he talked about this planet as much as he spoke about the Kessel Run.”

Rey frowns, the space between her brows creasing softly. “I’ve never heard of this place.”

“He loved this story. I can’t remember the details, but I remember laughing.”

“Tell me. You know the story.”

It’s against her better instinct, but she reaches forward. She tries to link her hands with his, but he draws it away, as if the leather of his glove may scald her. She’s tempted to raise an eyebrow, and tell him she’s tackled the Falcon’s wires. Nothing can scare her.

But a shiver of desire runs through her, in the low shallow of her belly, as she watches him remove his glove, and when she sees his bare fingers, exposed to her, reaching out.

The pull grows in her heart. She ignores it.

“There was this, madman, I guess you’d call him. Klysk. The Red Nebula has life. A little part of it teems with it. That life is fed by and it feeds in return two crystals in the planet’s temple. Their beliefs stem completely from those two crystals. Han, he thought he could make money from them. So he stole them. Klysk outmaneuvered him. Betrayed him, took the two gems and tried to pilot his ship towards the Red Nebula’s sun. He believed the life the crystals gave were an undeserved gift. He wanted to… he wanted to destroy it.” Ben breathes, tilting his head against the seat’s headrest. A smile crept onto his lips. “Han did the thing he knew best. He performed a switch, so all Klysk had were duplicates.”

“He went to make money, and accidentally saved life?”

“Like I said: the thing he knew best how to do.” His thoughts wander again, screaming out loud and clear. It’s another hue of red, striking into the chest of Han Solo. Her tears drip down her cheeks at a third hue. It’s the scarlet hue of the planet, a memory blurred by age. A tale being told. A young boy with messy black hair laughs, toys gently floating in the air as he flails giddily, held up high by his father.

 _Havin’ fun there, kid?_ says the memory.

Rey comes back to the present, and immediately holds Ben’s hand tighter.

“You left me,” she whispers at last. It unbottles something. Tears fill Ben’s eyes.

“My father. He was my father.” He sucks in a breath. “My father saved those people.”

At her chest, Rey feels a warmth. It pulses slowly. Growing, growing into a hum. The thin rope around her neck lightens. Rey draws back, the tips of her fingers still softly against his. Whatever might be happening, she doesn’t want to let go. She knows he doesn’t either. He didn’t want to back on Ahch-To, when Skywalker interrupted them.

The crystal that lies around her neck lifts into the air.

It hangs between them and it glows a brilliant blue. She wonders what Ben sees in that colour.

She sees an old man, a Jedi Master, weighed down by a legacy.

Ben leans forward slightly. Red bleeds into the blue, rapidly followed by a deep, rich yellow.

“Rey…”

“I know.” She squeezes his hand.

The crystal brightens, yellow turning to purple, and brightens again until the cockpit is filled with light. Rey squeezes her eyes shut against the sunset yellow glow, shifting slowly towards white.

The glowing light fades, leaving them in a half-dark. The crystal lands against her shirt, nestled among her robes.

She lets go of Ben’s hand, feeling the crystal, rolling it between finger and thumb. Its white colour pulses and glows.

“It’s yours now.” Ben’s tone is gentle.

She feels safe as he speaks. Secure.

For all the resources the Resistance is accumulating now, for the family it has given her, in Finn and Rose and General Organa and Poe, she never feels secure. She feels too exposed, the only Force user among soldiers and agents and politicians and negotiators.

So unlike this feeling that she feels with Ben; like they are two halves of a whole. She misses it. She misses it terribly.

She lifts her hand, curving her palm against his jaw, caressing him. His skin is so soft and warm, where the rest of him is sharp and jagged, not quite knowing its place. Even the way he sits is ill-fitting to the rest of the world. The galaxy too big to hold him.

She leans forward and presses her lips to his. His hand curves around her waist.

It’s instinctive for her to rise up from her seat, and to slide into his lap. To sink her fingers into his hair and arch her back, rolling her hips against his. She kisses him, caresses him, savouring him until the inevitable. Until he fades into the ether, and she’s left alone once more.

 

* * *

 

Maybe it’s the Force being kind to her, to him, but even when Rey turns her back on him, leading him towards the Falcon’s quarters, the connection doesn’t leave. He’s still with her, still holding onto her.

When she turns back to face him. When he gathers her up, one hand at her back, the other at her thigh, hoisting her up so he can kiss her again (again, again, _again_ ). When they stumble towards the Falcon’s broad bunk, and he kneels over her, his hands running over the width of her torso, between the valley of her breasts. When he presses a kiss to the place where the crystal she claimed lies, the feeling shudders through her spine, causing her to wrap her legs around his hips and tug him closer.

Rey laughs as he jerks forward, eyes widening slightly in surprise. He smiles back (it’s like the sun on Takodana, his smile, it’s like seeing green for the first time) and brushes the hollow of her cheek, nuzzling his nose against the space between her neck and her shoulder, before he kisses just behind her ear. She grips his lapels with one hand in reply, the other brushing back his curls to expose his ears.

She loves those ears. Kissing them, nibbling on them. She giggles as he tries to shake his head to cover them back up, glaring at her.

“I like them,” she says simply, brushing her thumb over the shell of his ear. She likes them because they’re so big and cumbersome they strip away the mask of Supreme Leader and make him just Ben. Her Ben. Clumsy, intense, awkward Ben with a power as great as hers.

He mutters something about bad taste. In another moment, she might let the comment sting her, but everything is too heady, too light. She smiles instead and brushes her fingers through his hair, over the path of his throat before she works the fastenings of his tunic. It’s a routine, and her fingers traverse the path easily. His torso is pale in this light, glistening with sweat. A part of her wants to straddle him and lick a stripe up from his torso to his collarbone.

She holds him closer, dropping kisses on the broad plane of his shoulders. As his fingers hook against the edge of her pants, she lets him go, sinking her head deeper against the pillow. Her smile widens, feeling the cool air hit her skin.

Her Ben. All hers. She sinks his fingers into his hair, sighing softly as he dips his head towards her wet, hot centre.

Beyond, the Red Nebula shines.

 

* * *

 

She woke to Ben’s fingers twined gently in her hair, and shared a final kiss with him before the connection broke.

The last thing she could see of him were his eyes. Big and brown and tired, world-weary. She brushed her thumb against his eyelids, tracing the shape of them.

Then she leaned forward, brushing her lips against his, her eyes fluttering closed. The connection left her, and she lay alone among soiled sheets.

That was two days ago. Now, she’s back among the wires of the Falcon, working on an overhead unit in the cockpit. Her arms are tired, the small of her back beginning to ache while the stars streak by in a hum.

“I’m coming back,” she told General Organa as she put the ship into hyperspace, the ship turned away from the Red Nebula. “Turned out Dantooine wasn’t the right path to take.”

“Disappointing,” the general remarked. Rey had wondered idly how she was going to hide the fact her brother’s crystal had now been reclaimed by her, with help of her son, from General Organa, whose very purpose seemed to bring out truth and peace from torment, damn the consequences.

“May the Force be with you,” Leia said to Rey’s silence. Rey smiled, beaming a little too widely, and wished her the same.

After an hour and a bit of work, the Falcon’s engines rumble happily. Rey leaves the cockpit, wiping sweat from the back of her neck with a rag. She wipes her fingers against the rag, cleaning them of spots of oil and grease.

Out of the corner of her eye, she notices him.

She makes herself a cup of caf. Glances over her shoulder as tendrils of steam gather in the air. Ben’s at the dejarik table. In his hands, he holds his saber. He fiddles with the casing, as if trying to prise it open.

Picking up the cup, she leans against the counter. Curiosity fills her the more she watches him. A saber is meant to be an extension of self, and he works with it like this is his first encounter with a saber. It reminds her of the first time they fell into bed together. It was a clumsy tangle of desire, limbs and kisses, all clacking teeth and cramp in her leg.

He answers her silent question by glancing up at her, only briefly. She sees a mark on his lip, and then, at his temple too. Bowing his head, he lets his eyes flutter closed. All at once, she is not on the Falcon, threading through space. She is still. Standing, on land. Above her, there’s muted conversation and the distant sound of alien music, the language a spit of vowels she doesn’t yet know.

The room itself is a patchwork, a hodgepodge of materials, stone and metal fused together to make what looks to be a storage room. Ancient chests sit next to crates, and moonlight trickles in through a narrow window.

“It doesn’t look the same I know. The First Order saw to that.”

Her heart leaps into her throat.

“Ben…” Her caf slips from her fingers, landing with a crash, but she’s leaping over a wooden chest, dodging past crates to kneel in front of him, clasping his chin.

He winces, jerking away from her.

“I didn’t see it before,” she mutters. “Oh, _hell_.”

There’s bruises forming at his temple. Dried blood around his nostrils, and his bottom lip is split.

“What the hell did you do?” she asks, smacking his thigh like she’s seen Kare do to Wexley when she’s thought him dead on a mission. It was the worst thing to think, Rey knew, when she saw Kare weeping openly for her husband. When he came back she’d thrown her arms around his neck and peppered him with kisses before she’d smacked his chest and scolded him for not using his comms.

“I became entangled in a plan formed over,” Ben tells her, slowly, “a while. Hux and the other Knights were… dissatisfied with my leadership, I suppose.”

If it weren’t for his injuries, Rey knows she’d cover Ben with kisses and hold him as tight as she dared until her heartbeat stopped racing.

“Force, I have to come and find you—you are on Takodana, aren’t you? If you’d just told me what had happened, I would’ve—”

“Would’ve what?” Ben sighs, stopping her in her tracks. He continues working on his saber. With the split lip, his breaths are laboured. His speech is careful, lips barely moving. “The Resistance. You would’ve taken me to the Resistance. But they—they wouldn’t take me. Even if my mother forgave me—”

“They wouldn’t accept you,” she finishes for him. She presses her cheek to his thigh, swallowing. Even if he has the support of his mother, the Resistance’s commanders and Finn, Rose and Poe, there will still be those who think him undeserving or fear him to be a double agent, playing both sides.

“I didn’t think of that,” she says eventually. “I just wanted you.”

She hears a crack, like metal splitting apart, and she raises her head.

“Skywalker always repeated the same teaching: a Jedi’s saber is an extension of his own self. I often questioned it. I thought,” Ben sighs, with a heavily laboured breath. She squeezes his knee, trying to urge him not to speak, but he brushes her hand away. He shakes his head. “I thought, that if a Jedi’s saber is his own self, then what’s the crystal? What part does it play?”

He tilts the saber against his hand, curving his palm against the opening. The crystal slides out of it, and his fingers curl over it, his nails tracing over his flesh.

He reaches out to her.

Swallowing, Rey offers out her hand. The saber is a Jedi’s soul, so say the ancient texts. What’s at the centre of someone’s soul? You’d assume a heart.

Rey finds Ben’s eyes. Her heart beats fast, her attention flitting over his injuries.

His palm is warm against hers. Against her palm, she feels the weight of a crystal. _His_ crystal. It’s heavier than the one that lays around her neck currently.

“Take it,” he says gruffly. “It’s always been yours.”

She knows what she’ll see before she looks, turning her palm face up and stretching out her fingers, but her heartbeat quickens still. The crystal is a pure white. Its ugly, heavy crack is not quite healed, a fracture along the centre of the crystal. She wonders if this was what triggered whatever plan his Knights had, if seeing the purification of their Master’s crystal had spurred them to action. Spurred them to beating him, and bringing another to power.

She shouldn’t be grateful (what kind of person is grateful for another’s wounds), but she thanks the crystal all the same.

“I don’t know what I need to do,” Ben sighs, glancing around the storage room. “But Maz figures staying low on Takodana is my best bet.”

“Come back.”

“What?”

Her eyes brim with tears as she raises her head. She stands and softly cups the back of his neck. She dips her head, kissing the corner of his mouth.

“However long it takes. Atone, and come back.” She kisses his cheek. “That’s where you can start, Ben Solo.”

His eyes don’t look tired when she finds them again, and stares into them, remembering them. She knows after this, she won’t see him for a long while.

Not until they’re both ready.

She commits his eyes to memory. They’re soulful, that deep, dark ochre brown, almost black that speaks of ancient years and years still to come.

“I love you.”

The connection fades, and she is back in the Falcon with a broken cup and caf-stained boots.

She whispers out into the ether, hoping he’ll hear her.

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know this ends on a note which could easily make it into a multi-chapter, but I plan to keep this as a one-shot for now.
> 
> Wookieepedia articles for anyone who wants them:  
> [Red Nebula.](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Red_Nebula)  
> [Dantooine (Legends).](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dantooine/Legends)  
> [Crystal Cave (Dantooine).](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Crystal_Cave_\(Dantooine\))


End file.
